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Serenity Image Run #5

On the night of Thursday 2018 August 30th EDT, or Friday 2018 Aug 31 UT, I went out in the intermittent cloud and heavy dew to run a test of the Serenity Imaging Platform with a variety of barlow lenses.
Seeing was poor, transparency was poor, no mosquitos! but dew was falling even as the sun was setting.
Jupiter was still visible this early evening so I pointed and aligned on it and did a regular image run of 30 seconds with firecapture align on.

This is the result, worse than past nights but some surface detail is there.
This image was firecapture flipY (ie one inversion of the Y axis, so north should be up). Exposure time was up a lot due to the cloud and poor transparency.

Pointed over to Saturn, near zenith but a lot of intermittent cloud.
There were three barlows: a x2 Antares (lower cost), a x2 Celestron (a little more) and a x3 televue (a lot more).
The three images below are 30 second imaging runs, the first two at 100ms exposures and roughly 150 frames, the last at 190ms and roughly 80 frames. They were then processed and stacked using the best 25% of the frames.
The absolute low number of frames stacked is why they look so noisy. Only 40 frames on the first two and 20 on the last.
Focus is far more critical and is far worse in these images. Surface detail is lacking after registax wavelet processing.
Each barlow lens is mechanically different, with the lens mounted at different distances, requiring a coarse focus adjustment when switching from one to the other.

No dew shields on the corrector plate of the telrad yet… those are still coming. No dew heater power yet either.
Targets generally move out of the barlow Field of View when I step anywhere inside or move around inside the imaging platform. I was hoping the heavy construction (deck blocks on gravel on limestone rock, 2×8 joists, 12″ on centre, 7/16 OSB floor) would minimize or eliminate it.

Results:

No real quality difference was seen between the barlows, as the images were too poor to judge. Will have to repeat in better seeing and transparency.